“Full employment doesn’t
mean zero unemployment, since some people are always changing jobs, or are in
the process of leaving the labor market. Roughly speaking, the employment is at
full employment in the sense required here when any additional job creation in
one sector of the economy is feasible only by attracting workers away from
other sectors.”

Implicitly,
what is happening here is a vision of laborers as sovereign consumers in a
market place, chosing this or that place to work. Or, in times of lesser
employment, consumers without the full freedoms that endow the sovereign
consumer. Of course, at the same time, these choosers are also vendors. The
neo-classical model allows for this double aspect, but doesn’t ask any
questions about it that would lead to some nasty dialectical thinking. That way
lies madness and Marxism!

Myself,
though, I think that this is a way of looking at the labor force that dissolves
extremely pertinent sociological and economic distinctions. For instance, we
know that around 30 percent of American workers – to stick with America – work
in credentialed, or guild like, professions. Not just doctors and lawyers, but
accountants, nurses, plumbers and air conditioning men – given this fact, it
does seem like the definition of full employment here is, to say the least, not
comprehensive.

Interestingly,
when the “market” was first being conceptualized, in the 18th
century, it was conceptualized as a ‘natural’ phenomenon against an artificial
phenomenon – state sponsored or regulated activity. There is a famous and
defining text, Turgot’s entry in the Encyclopedie on the Foire, or fair, that
provides an exemplary instance of a discourse we have all become familiar with,
in which the workings of the market are ‘distorted’ or “interfered with” by
non-market, and hence, vicious, factors. Turgot used this distinction to
analyse fairs as opposed to markets:

“Fair and a marketare therefore both a gathering of merchants and customers at a set time andplace. But in the case of markets the merchants and buyers are brought together
by the mutual interest they have in seeking each other, while in the case of
fairs it is the desire to enjoy certain privileges — from which it follows that
this gathering is inevitably much more numerous and solemn at fairs. Although
the natural course of commerce is sufficient to establish markets, as a result
of the unfortunate principle which in nearly all governments has infected the
administration of commerce — I mean, the mania of directing all, regulating
all, and of never relying on the self-interest of man — it has happened, in
order to establish markets, that the police1has been made to interfere; that the number of markets has
been limited on the pretext of preventing them from becoming harmful to each
other; that the sale of certain goods has been prohibited except at certain
appointed places, either for the convenience of the clerks charged with
receiving the duty with which they are burdened, or because the goods were
required to be subjected to the formalities of testing and marking…”

Given
Turgot’s definition, one should speak, then, of the labor “market” as,
actually, a hybrid of a market and a fair, for certainly many, if not most of
those jobs we associate with the upper middle class are fair-like in their
composition.

But
there is more to the picture than that. I think Quiggens might be more aware
than most economists that governments also employ people. But still, it seems
to me that he underestimates employment
by the state. In other words, full employment is supposed to be something
sustained by private enterprise in which the state plays only a marketmaker
role, by using its powers to tax, borrow, and raise and lower interest rates to
create optimum conditions of demand in the private sector.. But – to use the US
as an example – full employment in the sense of the private sector absorbing
all but a small portion of the working population has never been the case since
the great depression. Since WWII, the government has gone from employing about
13 percent of the workforce to close to 17 percent. In 2009, for instance,
according to the Bureau of Labor, there are around 22 million Americans
employed by local, state and federal governments.

This
means, at first glance, that the private sector employs on average about 82-84
percent of the work force. In actuality, given a very rough average of
unemployment of 5 percent, which is really generous, the private sector ends up
employing closer to 78 to 80 percent of the work force.

You can look elsewhere in the
developed world and find similar statistics. The OECD has published a comparison across countries of the
percentage of the work force employed in the public sector. The scandinavian
countries rank high – in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, over 30 percent of the
workforce works in the public sector. The UK is 21.5 percent in 2015. In
Australia, the public sector grew in the past four years – an exception to the
OECD norm – to 18.9 percent of the employed population.

So
the first thing one can safely say about full employment, even before
brandishing the market metaphor, is that
under modern capitalism, it doesn’t ever happen if we rely solely on the
private sector. In a sense, the unemployed mass of the Great Depression was
dissolved into the state, and has remained there ever since.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.